Mossad vs. Jihad

I used to be frantic with worry about Jihadists making my life miserable. No more.

No more Jihadists, I mean. Gabriel Allon, art restorer by day, assassin by night, shot them all.

Of course, Gabriel Allon, the hero of Daniel Silva’s series about Mossad vs the World, does not kill all Jihadi in one thriller. This entry, The Messenger, is the ninth in a series of twelve novels, and the bad guys have to be rationed carefully to give Gabriel something to shoot in each book. But it’s a good thing for Musselmen that they beget lots and lots of Musselbabies because Gabriel pops them just as fast as they graduate from Terror School.

In this story the restorer/assassin dangles a heretofore unknown Van Gogh painting as bait to lure a wealthy Saudi art collector who is also a major sponsor of terrorism. Everyone dies.

One blurbist describes Daniel Silva as the new Ludlum. Another blurbist describes Silva as the new Le Carré. They’re both right in the sense that the subject matter (training an innocent to be a secret agent) is Le Carré, but the writing level is Ludlum. The blurbists are also both wrong: The moral ambiguity of Le Carré and Ludlum never clouds the issue here. It’s Whack-A-Mole with a burnoose.

Great fun. You’re almost tempted to forget that Daniel Silva is so outrageously anti-Catholic he makes Dan Brown look like Scott Hahn. For example, did you know that the Nazis were only following Vatican orders when they initiated the “final solution?” Neither did I. Neither did anyone else except Daniel Silva.